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Joe Nash 2023-01-24 14:30:17

We have quite a FoC relevant edition of Papers We Love Education this month: we’ll be discussing “Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education” with Professor Felienne Hermans! Thursday 26th at 6pm CET, all the info here: github.com/papers-we-love/edu/discussions/11

For those not familiar with Hedy:

hedycode.com

Arvind Thyagarajan 2023-01-26 13:40:48

Highly recommend!

The problem is an old and wonderful one -- how do you make it easier to get started with programming languages? (e.g. COBOL from the 60's where you describe arithmetic in words?) The desire to be “forgiving” of minor errors comes at the expense of precision of expression, and Hedy meets this head on!

They are deliberately matching this expression-precision trade off with well defined "levels" for learners to gain confidence without big jumps, scary failures, or large cognitive loads. Every time you discover a lack-of-precision need you discover a syntactic solution, and level up.

In essence, "how do you lower the floor while keeping the ceiling high?"

Joe Nash 2023-01-27 15:04:18

They’re also tackling A LOT of natural languages (the ability to do so is enabled by the levels), and there’s some fun parsing challenges with that.

Recording of Felienne’s talk is here! twitch.tv/videos/1719122823

📝 Papers We Love Education: Felienne Hermans - twilioquest on Twitch

Jim Meyer 2023-01-28 16:34:37

The code engine in Henosia can now interact with Chrome's own debugger, including any local variables used at the breakpoint.

It's an internal tool for now to debug the code engine. Might be useful for hybrid designers though 😁

Details in this twitter post.

🎥 henosia-breakpoint-locals.mp4